Dear Folks,

Thanks so much for your prayers for our Bolivian trip. We had perfect weather, only one short scare with military police that resolved itself in five minutes with no discomfort to any of us, only one member sick for two days, and no fights in our ten days there. I’m told these are all pretty amazing things for a group our size.

While we were there we tore down walls (enlarged a school room in Santa Cruz) we built new walls (for a small bathroom and kitchen on the pastor’s house in the Ayore village) we sanded off old paint on desks and tables and we put on new paint (at the Santa Cruz school) we painted rooms and buildings (school rooms and the church in the Ayore village) and we played with lots and lots of kids. I can’t remember ever working so hard–from early in the morning to late at night–nor can I remember ever seeing poorer people.

The city of Santa Cruz is, I believe, one of the richest in Bolivia, and it was filthy and poor. The Indian village where we spent several days made the Alaskan villages I’m used to look like Disney Land. No running water, no electricity. Just adobe brick houses with corrugated tin roofs. The houses were one room about twelve by twelve and entire families slept in those. Most of the living was done in the yard–the cooking, the eating. If there was a garbage dump, I didn’t see it. People just threw their trash on the ground wherever they happened to be standing. And the kids were the dirtiest, greediest, thievingest lot I’ve ever seen.

We worked with two doctors and several nurses running medical clinics. The biggest health problem in the village, by far, is disease caused by prostitution. The girls in the village begin selling themselves from as young as ten years old. Men go out from the cities and towns and pay the girls 10 Bolivianos (about $1.50 US) to have a go in the nearest ditch.

Another health problem is the drug and alcohol abuse that usually goes along with such mean living conditions.

The situation is not hopeless, though. God has given missionaries hearts for the people so there is a full-time missionary couple living in Posa Verde. They are Bolivians from a different Indian tribe than the Ayore people they are serving. There is also a church building in the village and a local Ayore pastor. The children, for all their disadvantages and health problems seem to be bright and happy. The government is not helping the people but the church has taken an interest and so they are getting what they are most in need of–love.

The day we left the village of Posa Verde we had the biggest game of duck, duck, goose (pato, pato, ganso) I’ve ever seen. About seventy kids in a huge circle playing while mothers, many of whom were not friendly to the church, watched and laughed and laughed and laughed. Playing with the kids, the missionaries said, was the most significant thing we did on the trip.

Poverty is not the cause of the problems for the Ayore–it’s a lack of love. They do not feel loved by others, nor do they appear to offer love to one another or to outsiders. Everything seems to be about how to use others and take from them so you can better your own position. They will only overcome this by seeing others love them sacrificially, I think. Ultimately they need to see the sacrificial love of Christ, but a good first step is for his followers to take up their crosses and show love to their neighbors.

Toni, a doctor and the wife of a doctor, who owns a house in Posa Verde and lets the missionaries live there, and who works in a free medical clinic in Santa Cruz, told me that their biggest enemy in Posa Verde was a man they call the Professor. He was the teacher in the village and he was hugely opposed to Christianity. Witch doctors put curses on missionaries and on people who were friendly to missionaries and many of the people are afraid to have anything to do with Christianity, but the professor hated Christians for other reasons. The village had missionaries fifty years earlier but they had left the village and a generation had grown up feeling abandoned and betrayed. (The missionaries now aim to love the children of the village, hoping to build a relationship of trust and that’s why they were so happy we were a group of mostly women and children and we could do VBS with the kids.) But three weeks ago, the professor was converted to Christianity. Toni lays his conversion at the feet of the short-term missionaries who have gone down. She said the professor asked her, “Why do these people keep coming? What can these rich people get out of coming down to this poor village? Why do they build for us, and work for us, and hug us and love us when they don’t even know us?” And Toni told him, “They love Jesus and they know Jesus loves you, so they love you, too.”

So, I am convinced that short-term missions are a great way for families to spend their vacation times. Sending people may be better than just sending money, after all. (And it wasn’t all work–we also had a couple of days to sightsee and shop, and have manicures and pedicures, even. Hey, we wanted to support the local businesses!) I had a great experience, am tempted to move down there myself, and would urge any of you thinking about short-term missions, to go for it.

Thanks for your support!

Oh, and Shane put together a short slide show with music. If you want to see it go to:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=jwZYg2ZsEVU

See if you can find Shane and Nikki–they are changed from when many of you last saw them.

The first song on Shane’s slide show is sung by two of the girls who went with us–and the second line–”if you say ‘wait,’ we will wait” is illustrated with our lying on the floor in the Santa Cruz airport where we waited for seven hours before being told our flight was canceled. We had to go back through customs and pick up our fifty large pieces of luggage (we were taking stuff home for missionaries moving back to the States) and figure out how to safely move twenty-five people, many of whom were young and many of whom did not speak Spanish, and all that luggage from the airport to the hotel at four in the morning in a country where many people, cab drivers included, would steal your luggage and leave you in a ditch without a second thought. It was a long, hard night and it gave us a new appreciation for how hard it was for our hosts to feed us all and move us around the country without losing any of us. (Just keeping the dishes clean in places with no clean water supplies was a pretty huge task, but by God’s grace they did it well and we all stayed pretty healthy.)

sally

P.S. I know this won’t mean anything to you so you won’t remember long, but if any of you want to pray right now for our bus driver–Jose Luis–that would be great. He has a kind of winsome look about him and many of us prayed for him often down there and will keep praying for him here. He’s not a Christian, is married with five kids, and he worked and ate alongside of us for the week were there. We are praying that he will hunger for the joy he saw in us and that the gospel messages he heard will bear fruit in his life. He will continue having contact with the Smiths, our missionaries in Bolivia, as he drives the bus for the school where they teach.

Here’s a picture of Jose Luis with Doctor Toni in the background. They are watching the mammoth game of pato pato ganso on our last day in the village.